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Biden Pledges to Recognize Armenian Genocide.
So Did Obama (He Didn’t)
By Patrick Goodenough | | 3:55am EDT
Then-Vice President Joe Biden and Recep Tayyip Erdogan –€“ then prime minister, now president — “ in 2013. (Photo by Mladen Antonov/AFP via Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) – Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden promised on Friday to support Armenian Genocide legislation as president, but was silent on President Obama’s broken pledge on the matter during the Obama-Biden administration.
Instead, Biden has focused on his record in the U.S. Senate, where he co-sponsored a number of measures on the subject, and his endorsement last fall of bipartisan resolutions that passed in the House and Senate.
An Armenian American leader, while also critical of President Trump’s position on the matter, challenged Biden to come clean on his stance while vice president.
“If Joe Biden agreed with the Obama-Biden administration’s betrayal of its promise to recognize the Armenian Genocide, then he should step up and take ownership of that decision,” said Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) executive director Aram Hamparian.
“If he disagreed – but was overridden by President Obama – then he should say as much,” she added. “Either way, he needs to do more than promote a resolution that Congress has already adopted or recycle a promise that he and President Obama have already broken.”
Asbarez, a 112-year-old Armenian-American publication in California, called Biden’s statement “tone-deaf.”
“While Biden touts his record as a senator supporting efforts for a Congressional recognition of the Armenian Genocide, he does not cite his abominable record on the issue when he was vice-president,” it said.
The Biden campaign did not respond to an invitation to comment.
The issue is a particularly sensitive one in the relationship between the U.S. and Turkey, which disputes that the mass killings of Armenian Christians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915 constituted a genocide. Genocide is legally defined as the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, along with actions designed to achieve that goal.
Armenian American advocates sometimes refer to Ankara’s stance as a “gag rule,” with which U.S. president have complied.
April 24, 2015, is the day marked as the beginning of the atrocities, and on Friday, President Trump and Biden both issued statements marking the 105th anniversary.
As he has in previous years, Trump used the Armenian phrase Meds Yeghern, meaning “great evil” or “great calamity.”
“Today, we join the global community in memorializing the lives lost during the Meds Yeghern, one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century,” he said. “Beginning in 1915, one-and-a-half million Armenians were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in the final years of the Ottoman Empire.”
By contrast, Biden’s statement did use the word “genocide.”
“It is particularly important to speak these words and commemorate this history at a moment when we are reminded daily of the power of truth, and of our shared responsibility to stand against hate – because silence is complicity,” Biden said. “Failing to remember or acknowledge the fact of a genocide only paves the way for future mass atrocities.”
“If elected, I pledge to support a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide and will make universal human rights a top priority for my administration,” Biden said.
Biden served in the Senate from January 3, 1973 until January 15, 2009, and then served as Obama’s vice president until January 2017.
A review of Armenia Genocide legislation shows that Biden co-sponsored measures in the Senate – none of which advanced – in 1984, 1987, 1989, in 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2008.
The Obama-Biden administration, however, shied away from references to genocide. In his annual April 24 statements, Obama referred initially to “the first mass atrocity of the 20th century,” and later also used the Meds Yeghern term.
He was not the first: Although President Ronald Reagan – in a 1981 Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation – formally described the mass killings of Armenian Christians as “genocide,” President George H.W. Bush referred to “terrible massacres,” President Clinton to “massacres” and “one of the saddest chapters of this century,” and President George W. Bush to an “appalling tragedy” and “one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.”
But Obama, when running for the White House, said unambiguously that he would call the episode a genocide, declaring his “firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.”
“[A]s President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide,” he said.
It was a pledge Obama failed to keep, and Biden with him.
One senior member of that administration who did use the politically-sensitive word “genocide” in connection to Armenia was Samantha Power, ambassador to the U.N., in the closing weeks of Obama’s presidency.
Eight years earlier Power – who won a Pulitzer Prize for a 2002 book on genocide – had urged Armenian Americans to support Obama for president, underlining his pledge and assuring them he could be “trusted.”
Once out of office, Power tweeted in April 2017, “I am very sorry that, during our time in office, we in the Obama administration did not recognize the Armenian Genocide.”
Granting Erdogan a ‘veto’
ANCA’s Hamparian also criticized Trump’s position, saying in a statement he had “copied and pasted the transparently euphemistic, patently offensive April 24th evasions issued by Barack Obama and his other predecessors.”
“Despite last year’s near-unanimous Congressional recognition of the Armenian Genocide, President Trump has, once again, granted Turkish President [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan – an openly anti-American dictator – a veto over honest U.S. remembrance of Turkey’s WWI-era genocide of millions of Armenians and other Christians,” she said.
Still, Turkey’s foreign ministry rejected Trump’s statement, saying it was “based on a subjective narrative which Armenians try to turn into a dogma.”
“This statement, made with domestic political considerations has no validity for us,” it said. “We reject the claims put forward in this statement.”
Turkey officially disputes that the mass killings were orchestrated or intentional. It says between 250,000 and 500,000 Armenians, along with a larger number of Muslims, died amid intercommunal violence, disease and starvation, amid World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
In a unanimous 1997 resolution, the Association of Genocide Scholars reaffirmed “that the mass murder of over a million Armenians in Turkey in 1915 is a case of genocide which conforms to the statutes of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.”
The U.S. House passed a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide last October by 405-11 votes, and the Senate in December passed its version by unanimous consent – a step Ankara called “one of the disgraceful examples of politicization of history.”